There's Not Much We Can Do About SCOTUS— Other Than Commit To Never Voting For Any Conservative Ever

In light of the hideous immunity ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday, I just want to remind everyone that 17 Democratic senators voted to confirm Clarence Thomas in 1991. In 2005, there were 15 Democratic senators willing to vote to confirm highly partisan corporate whore John Roberts. The following year, there were 5 conservaDems who voted to confirm Sam Alito. In 2018, Trump’s first SCOTUS nominee, Neil Gorsuch had 3 conservative Democratic senators— Joe Manchin (WV), Heidi Heitkamp (ND) and Joe Donnelly (IN)— vote to confirm. The following year, it was just Manchin among Dems who backed Brett Kavanaugh and, finally, in 2020, religionist freak Amy Coney Barrett was too much even for Manchin and got no Democratic votes. It’s worth noting that in 2017 Miss McConnell had engineered a reduction in the number of senators required to invoke cloture on Supreme Court nominations from 60 to a bare majority of senators voting. And in 2020, just before the presidential election, the vote to end the debate on the Coney Island Baby nomination was 51-48, Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voting to, in effect, keep Barrett off the Court, but to no avail because there just weren’t enough Democrats in the Senate.

Roberts— again, confirmed with 15 Democratic votes (mostly conservative Democrats but still considered Democrats by most people)— wrote that “The president therefore may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” Imagine how happy Nixon would have been to have this blatantly partisan a Supreme Court. He’s probably still be president!

Justice Sotomayor wasn’t quite as celebratory as Señor Trumpanzee was. From her horrified dissent yesterday: “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law... Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation... Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Ted Lieu (D-CA), moments after the ruling yesterday: “When Donald Trump was president, he appointed three Supreme Court justices. When Donald Trump lost the election, he undertook a massive effort to overturn those results to stay in power. When Donald Trump was indicted for trying to subvert the will of the people, those three justices he appointed ruled he’s immune from prosecution. The words 'presidential immunity' do not exist in the Constitution. An extremist President appointed extremist justices to execute an extremist agenda.”

Three months ago Arizona congressional candidate Conor O’Callaghan connected judicial rulings to elections. “On April 3rd, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch to the full Senate,” he wrote, “beginning a series of events that would ultimately lead to the fall of Roe v. Wade. We all know the story of how this court seat was stolen from President Obama and how Trump and McConnell systematically filled the lower courts with conservative judges, all the while bending the Supreme Court towards the far right. But the worst could still be yet to come if people don’t vote blue this fall… Now seven years since the day Gorsuch got the nod, we’ve lost Roe and personal freedoms are finding themselves under severe threat from the country’s highest court. Sitting out this cycle is simply not an option; electing Democrats is critical to securing reproductive freedom.”

I understand people are fatigued from being involved in seemingly non-stop high-stakes elections since 2016, but now is not the time to take our foot off the gas. This election cycle is quite literally the most important of our lifetime. Unless Democrats retain control of the Senate and keep the White House, MAGA extremists will continue to have disproportionate sway over judicial appointments. Control of both chambers of Congress will be necessary to pass crucial reforms, such as codifying Roe v. Wade once and for all and imposing ethics standards on the Supreme Court. It is therefore essential that we nominate strong Democrats who can actually win in targeted House districts like AZ-01, where there’s a strong possibility of turning red to blue.  We simply cannot afford to nominate weak candidates or those who may not share our values. 

…This election cycle will determine whether women have control over their own bodies, whether meaningful gun reform will finally be enacted, whether we secure our water supply for future generations and whether democracy is preserved and the American experiment persists. Without Democratic majorities, little good will be accomplished. Seven years from now, I hope we can look back and smile, knowing that we’ve come a long way from the abyss we are staring into today. It will only happen if we vote for the right candidates.

Jamie Raskin is Congress’ foremost Constitutional scholar. Yesterday, he issued this statement: “Today, the Supreme Court took a bulldozer to the democratic credo that no one—including presidents and former presidents—is above the law.  Three years ago, after Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell explained, ‘We have a criminal justice system in this country…  And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable.’  But today, far-right justices embedded with the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement conferred broad immunity on Donald Trump, even going so far as to help him keep evidence of his criminal actions from coming to light in a court of law.  Today’s ruling, postponing any prosecution of Trump until after the election and holding that Presidents are presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for using their office to assassinate political rivals, organize a military coup, or take bribes, is a radical break from the rule of law which underscores how much our democratic values have been eroded and are on the line in November.  Donald Trump has made it clear that, if he wins election, he will use his presidential powers to pardon all his co-conspirators and weaponize the Justice Department by firing career employees and replacing them with an army of sycophants willing to engage in retributive harassment against his political opponents.  All of this would be presumably allowable under today’s horrific decision.”

I'm not a Constitutional scholar, but I do have this to add from one of the most glorious moments of British history:

Elizabeth Warren seems pissed off— and dazed by the unbridled brazenness. “An extremist Supreme Court stacked by Donald Trump.” She wrote, “has ruled that the President is above the law. Six right-wing justices have given the President free rein to abuse the power of the presidency without constraint. If Donald Trump were President, could he get away with telling the Justice Department to make up dirt to put his political opponents in jail? Could President Trump get away with taking a bribe in exchange for vetoing a law? Could President Trump get away with sending an FBI hit squad to eliminate anyone he decided was a threat? If Trump doesn't get the votes on a bill he wants, can he get away with  ordering the military to round up every lawmaker in Congress? And can Trump get away with doing the same to the Supreme Court while he's at it? This decision is a grave reminder of the stakes in this moment in history.” 

At this point, I doubt any DWT readers are naive enough to imagine that all Democrats are the same. From what I know about O’Callaghan and the other candidates on this list, I doubt any of them would have voted to confirm Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett. Think about that when you vote— especially in primaries… and especially when “Democrats” in primaries include recently ex-Republicans who are still conservatives but just don’t like Trump.